Tags

1930s

1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

2010s

2020s

Anarchism

Anti-Apartheid

Anti-Austerity

Anti-Fascism

Anti-Nuclear Movement

Anti-Psychiatry

Anti-Racism

Anti-zionism

Anti/Alter-Globalisation

Autonomist

Black Liberation Movement

Cinema

Civil Liberties

Claimants Union

Class uprisings

Communism

Community Campaigns

Cooperative Movement

Countering Education

Decolonisation

Direct Action

Environmentalism

Experimental Culture

Feminism

Free Party Movement

Health Care Stuggles

History from Below

Housing Struggles

Irish Struggles

Italian Language

Left-Communism

Libertarian Communist

Marxism

Marxist-Feminism

Migrant Organising

Municipalism

National Liberation Stuggles

Peace Movement

Photography

Police Monitoring

Political Education

Prison Resistance

Psychogeography

Publications

Punk

Queer Movements

Radical Architecture

Radical Arts

Radical ecology

Reparations campaigns

Republicanism

Situationist

Socialism

Spanish Language

Squatting

State Monitoring

State Violence

Student Movements

Technology

Trade Unions

Underground Music

Underground Press

Women’s Liberation Movement

Work/Anti-Work

Workerism

Workers' Movement

Visit Us

MayDay Rooms is an archive, resource and safe haven for social movements, experimental and marginal cultures and their histories.

We are open: Wednesday–Friday, 11–6pm

Please contact us to book an archival appointment:
in-formation [AT] maydayrooms.org


Find us at:
88 Fleet Street
London
EC4Y 1DH

 


Using the Space

We offer free organising and event space  for unfunded activist and self-organised education groups, and we ask those who can afford to make a donation on a sliding scale to support the space.

The space is bookable from Monday-Friday and sometimes at the weekend.

More

Help us keep going

Join the MDR’s Friends scheme to help us sustain our archive as a resource for movements today, to continue to programme events and outreach around our collections, and provide meeting spaces, all free of cost.

More

Upcoming & Recent Events

More
March 26 @ 6:30 pm

Archiving from Below Discussion Series: Archiving as a communist inventory? with Agit Press

Sooner or later everything gets recuperated by our political enemies. Despite their warnings even the situationists were unable to escape this fate. Obviously, we don’t give up on militant ideas […]

March 20 @ 7:00 pm

Archival Film Club: Watermelon Women

Join us for a screening of Cheryl Dunye’s debut feature The Watermelon Woman (1996), a cult classic of the New Queer Cinema movement. The film follows Cheryl, a young Black […]

March 13 @ 7:00 pm

Big Flame: Building the Movements, New Politics

Join us for an evening with ex-Big Flamers Max Farrar and Kevin McDonnell, who will be discussing their new book, Big Flame: Building the Movements, New Politics, published by Merlin […]

March 6 @ 7:00 pm

Screening: Ultraviolence

The silence over the police killings of Black people is broken. Over two thousand people died at the hands of police in the UK. Inevitably police officers involved are not […]

February 27 @ 7:00 pm

Archival Film Night for LGBTQ+ History Month: The Archivettes (2019)

  When a group of women in the Gay Academic Union founded the Lesbian Herstory Archives in the mid-1970s, they did so in explicit recognition that lesbian herstory ‘was disappearing […]

Archive Blog

More

February 10, 2025

ARCHIVE OF THE MONTH: U.S Underground Newspaper 1968- 1970

MDR X DOPE MAGAZINE: TROOPS OUT NOW!

November 13, 2024

MDR x DOPE Magazine: Fight Back with the Claimants Unions

November 7, 2024

MDR Comrades @ Historical Materialism 2024

MayDay Rooms Pamphlet 03: Red Therapy

MayDay Rooms Projects

All Projects

Archiving from Below

Since its inception, MayDay Rooms has been built on the principle of archiving from below, challenging the conventional institutional methods of gathering, shaping, and disseminating the history of struggles.

After over a decade of archiving, we are launching a reading and discussion group to address the practices of archiving from below and strategies of activating the histories of resistance. 

The group is open to archivists, researchers, historians involved in both past and present organising, and anyone interested in radical archives. Our aim is to share our own approach, learn from each other, and collaboratively develop counter-archival practices that extend beyond mere critique.

For Peace!

Drawing on archives from Glasgow Women’s Library and MayDay Rooms, we revisit the peace movement’s material history, trying to better understand the diversity of tactics and intersecting movements which have shaped it. As European states enter a new cycle of rearmament, this exhibition speaks to those hoping for and struggling for peace. 

We orient the history of the peace movement away from a few well-known campaigns to highlight little-known histories that are nonetheless integral to the struggles for a demilitarised world. For Peace! interweaves historical strands from Women’s Liberation, anti-colonial, socialist and anarchist movements, to address questions of non-violence, class, international solidarity and the role of liberation struggles. 

For Peace! is structured around two gestures of the peace movement. Looking inwards, we feature efforts to disarm the British state and remove US bases.Looking outwards, we showcase international networks of solidarity and highlight the colonial legacy of global weapons infrastructure. We also present some current campaigns to demilitarise education, to stop the arms trade and against the genocide of Palestinians. 

Featuring campaigns from the last 100 years, the exhibition combines original printed materials, banners, badges, handicrafts, photos, audio interviews and video footage. The material in the exhibition draws on the MayDay Rooms, the Glasgow Women’s Library, the Spirit of Revolt archives and personal collections.

A sister version of this exhibition will be on display at Four Corners (London) 8-24th May. There will also be an open-access online archive of the For Peace! Collection which will launch in the Autumn. We hope that the exhibition and archive will act as a resource for those struggling against the war-state everywhere.

Uncovering the Archive

The programme offers a free series of workshops & screenings with an aim to engage young people (18-25) from marginalised backgrounds and/or those who have not engaged with archives before or are not currently in higher education. The intention is to introduce the archive as a resource and archiving as a mode of storytelling available to, and representative of, those who are normally excluded from history- making practices.

The programme offers a free series of workshops & screenings with an aim to engage young people (18-25) from marginalised backgrounds and/or those who have not engaged with archives before or are not currently in higher education. The intention is to introduce the archive as a resource and archiving as a mode of storytelling available to, and representative of, those who are normally excluded from history- making practices.


Skip to content